According to the World Health Organisation, poor air quality claims seven million lives globally every year, with urban air pollution accounting for four million of these deaths.

To combat this crisis, a New Zealand company – appropriately named Healthy Breath – designed a unique face mask called MEO, with a filter made from the wool of a new breed of sheep, developed specifically for its pollution filtering fibres. But who says to breathe healthy you can’t also be fashion conscious? So, they partnered with iconic New Zealand fashion designer Karen Walker to make the masks stylish.

The challenge with such an unusual product – where New Zealand was not the target market – was to achieve widespread media coverage locally that would then be read internationally, and thus boost the product’s ‘pure New Zealand’ brand identity.

And coverage is exactly what Anthem achieved. Lots of it. From stories on prime-time TV news to the front pages of major dailies, to extensive online and radio broadcast news, we shared the journey of the designers, the scientists and the entrepreneurs who developed the product and built the profile of MEO as a true Kiwi ‘export success’ story.